Gaming platform Roblox was all set to go public in late 2020, before putting off its IPO until this year to give more time to decide how to price it. Now the […]
Tag: Funding
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Sacem extends emergency rescue fund as pandemic continues
Covid-19 vaccines may be starting to roll out, but there are still a tough few months (at least) for artists and songwriters ahead. Not just because concerts aren’t up and […]
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Mindfulness app Calm raises $75m at a valuation of $2bn
Investors aren’t chilled about meditation: they’re very excited, and they’re splashing their cash accordingly. One of the digital mindfulness space’s big players, Calm, has raised another $75m of funding, which […]
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Roxi raises £13m funding round and launches video jukebox
UK streaming service Roxi has announced a £13m funding round (around $17.3m) this morning, led by Sun Capital Partners. There’s one surprising name in the list of additional investors: Guy […]
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Pharrell Williams offers startups Black Ambition
Artist Pharrell Williams wants to encourage a new wave of startups founded and owned by Black and Latinx people in the US. He’s launched a non-profit organisation called Black Ambition […]
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Audoo raises £5.2m from investors including Björn Ulvaeus
British startup Audoo has raised a Series A funding round of £5.2m (around $6.9m) to continue developing and rollout out its technology to track public performance usage of music.
The round was raised in 10 weeks from investors including Edinv, Björn Ulvaeus and Tileyard London. The funding follows Audoo’s win at the Midemlab startups contest earlier this summer.
The company makes an ‘audio meter’ that, once installed in a public venue (for example a gym, cafe or pub) tracks the music being played, and feeds that data back to collecting societies.
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TicketSwap and GoFundMe aim to raise £2m for European venues
We’ve written about the fundraising campaigns for independent venues run in the US (by NIVA) and the UK (by the Music Venue Trust). Now there’s a new pan-European campaign launched […]
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Round Hill Music Royalty Fund raises $282m from share issue
The arms race in catalogue acquisition continues. Round Hill has announced that its Round Hill Music Royalty Fund has raised another $282m from a share issue.
The money won’t be burning a hole in its wallet for long, we sense.
“The Company has an identified portfolio of exceptional songs and catalogues including classic tracks from some of the world’s best-known artists that are already extremely familiar to the Investment Manager. We will actively progress and update on our intention to purchase the identified portfolio for the Company as soon as practical,” said chair Trevor Bowen in a statement this morning.
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Vimeo raises $150m as parent company mulls spin-off
Video streaming service Vimeo may be spinning off as an independent company within parent group IAC. The news was revealed as IAC also announced that Vimeo had raised $150m in a new funding round, from Thrive Capital and GIC.
A letter to shareholders from IAC boss Joey Levin outlined Vimeo’s journey from being a (smaller) YouTube rival, to more of a B2B platform for brands and companies using video.
“Prior to the pandemic, we were steadily proving Vimeo’s fit in the market. Organic bookings growth consistently accelerated last year from 11% in Q1’19 to 27% in Q4’19 as we began to expand from our filmmaker roots to a broader audience of small businesses and large enterprises,” he wrote.
“Then the pandemic hit, and that acceleration exploded to 41% in Q1, 79% in Q2, and 56% in the most recent quarter.” More than 3,500 business clients are currently using Vimeo.
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ByteDance reportedly raising $2bn at $180bn valuation
How much is TikTok’s parent company worth? 13 Warner Music Groups? Just over 5.3 Universal Music Groups? 3.7 Spotifys? Or perhaps just over a fifth of a Facebook? These are some sketchy sums based on a Bloomberg report that ByteDance is in talks to raise a $2bn funding round valuing the business at $180bn.
That would be a big leap from the $105bn that the company was being valued at in private trades less than six months ago, in May 2020. ByteDance’s revenues reportedly more than doubled from $7.4bn in 2018 to more than $17bn in 2019, with more recent reports suggesting the company was predicting around $28.7bn of revenues in 2020 (caveat: Covid-19 impact unknown.)
Bloomberg’s report also suggested that ByteDance may soon “start preparing some of its biggest assets including Douyin and Toutiao for an initial public offering in Hong Kong”. Douyin is the Chinese version of TikTok, while Toutiao is the news app that kicked off ByteDance’s rise to prominence in its early days. And, as has been well documented, TikTok itself (or at least a new US entity) could be on the way to an IPO itself.
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WMG leads funding round for 3D worlds startup Anything World
We had a line about a startup called Anything World in a bulletin earlier this month, intrigued by its plans to let people “create 3D worlds with your voice”.
Today, the UK-based company is revealing that WMG was the lead investor in its pre-seed funding round.
“I’m excited about the power that their technology allows within the immersive space,” said Oana Ruxandra, EVP business development and chief digital officer at WMG. “It creates exciting new opportunities for our artists to express their creativity and engage with their fans through 3D worlds and objects.”
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Quincy Jones invests in music/tech startup Musimap
Quincy Jones is no stranger to the world of music/tech startups: he founded music video-on-demand service Qwest TV, which launched three years ago.
Now he’s also investing in another startup, Musimap, which describes itself as an “emotional artificial intelligence” company, with a lead product called MusiMe which is a “psycho-emotional profiling engine”.
Essentially it analyses people’s listening to try to understand their personality (“Is your customer self-aware or spiritual? Does he like exercise or travelling? Our emotion-sensitive algorithm can predict automatically all this and more from the music he loves…” as its website explains it.)